


Resting Place

by Squintern



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, Interlude, Post-Movie, really honestly how to tag, why cant i tag properly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:28:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27733819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squintern/pseuds/Squintern
Summary: Andy likes to say it’s all about what time leaves behind. What it leaves behind is not always bad, or good, or particularly exciting. Sometimes it leaves behind the most every-day moments.___In which Nile loves space and Joe and Nicky remember a rather regular sort of night.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 8
Kudos: 102





	Resting Place

**Author's Note:**

> Am I currently in the middle of a longer fic that needs finishing and was supposed to be posted before this? Yes. But did I also come across [an article](https://scitechdaily.com/dont-miss-it-jupiter-saturn-will-look-like-double-planet-for-first-time-since-middle-ages/) telling me a very rare sighting of planets last occurred in the Middle Ages and immediately decide to capitalize on that? Absolutely yes.

“We need a telescope,” Nile announced as she swept into the kitchen. Andy, Joe, and Nicky looked up questioningly. Nile was already brandishing her phone so they could all see.

“In December, Jupiter and Saturn will be the closest they’ve ever been in the sky since the Middle Ages. You should be able to see them together in the same field of viewing in a telescope. So, we need a telescope,” she explained. Andy shrugged and went back to carving the small hunk of wood in her hand. Nile turned the full force of her determined look on Nicky and Joe.

Nicky had taken the phone from her and was skimming the article she had up. Joe leaned back in his chair and ran a hand idly over his beard. Nile manfully resisted pointing out again that Joe was, in fact, stroking it while thinking. (They’d had that argument nearly fifty times in the few months she’d known them. Joe refused to admit he was a cliche, Nile found it deeply amusing, and Nicky always found some excuse to leave the room the moment it was brought up.)

“Best viewing is near the equator,” Nicky said. Andy looked up at that.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to go further south,” she said. When they’d settled in Luxembourg after the Incident with Merrick, Andy had been adamant that they weren’t nearly far enough from the blast radius. But her argument had been a bit weak considering she’d ripped her stitches a third time by that point, so she’d grudgingly agreed to stay at least until she’d healed more.

“We have that house in Somalia. A few miles north of the equator, I think,” Nicky said. Joe stroked his beard again, caught Nile’s eye, and hastily changed the motion to scratching his chin underneath.

“When in the Middle Ages?” he interrupted before Andy and Nicky could start on travel plans. Nicky consulted Nile’s phone again.

“Sometime in March, 1226,” he read. “Apparently just before dawn on the fourth.”

“March 4, 1226,” Joe said. He smiled, eyes already melted and adoring as he turned to Nicky. “Where were we?” Nicky smiled that tiny, reserved smile that tucked into the corner of his mouth, right where Joe was likely to drop a kiss when he had only half of Nicky’s attention.

“Why are you asking me?” he said. Andy scoffed quietly and took her carving out to the back porch. Nile sat herself happily in Andy’s vacant chair and slid her phone from Nicky’s grasp.

They were, possibly, the most sickeningly in love couple Nile had ever seen. She’d remarked once that if Hallmark could see them, they probably would finally start having gay couples in their movies. This had led to two weeks of consuming only Hallmark movies until Joe and Nile had been loudly despairing over the foolishness of the female lead while Nicky and Andy played a drinking game based on their biggest complaints. (The rules for the drinking game were still tacked up messily next to the TV and Nile was actually a bit proud that one of the rules was “take a shot every time Nile says only a white girl would do that.” She was 90% certain that particular rule had led to Nicky and Andy being absolutely plastered before they were even halfway through a movie.) Despite that, she also could never get enough of the way they were together. The notion that over 900 years at each other’s side hadn’t dimmed their love, or their memories of time spent together. She eagerly listened to whatever stories they told her and had even managed to get a few stories from them that Andy hadn’t heard. She’d gotten used to the heart eyes after long enough.

Joe happily reached over and took Nicky’s hand. He would sometimes put on airs for Nile, to really play up the sappiness of whatever memory they were relaying just to watch her roll her eyes affectionately, but this time his starting sigh was genuine.

“March of 1226, we were making our way back up North, toward my home country,” he began, “We’d been traveling South for quite a while — when we finally left our own armies we went South and sort of kept going, stopping here and there to spend a few decades in peace — but we were having dreams of Andy and Quynh being somewhere approximately in Egypt, probably looking for us. We were all working our way toward some recognizable landmark, and since I was fairly sure my homeland wouldn’t be all _that_ changed in a couple hundred years, I thought I could pick a place they’d be able to center on.”

“Was it?” Nile asked, interrupting. “Different. Was it different?”

“Ah,” Joe said, “no place stays the same over a hundred years. The people, the clothing, the language, it all shifts. But I remembered the ground, and it remembered me, and it wasn’t far from my birth land that Andy and Quynh finally found us.” He let Nile chew on that for a moment.

That was his way, she’d realized, of reminding her that her life wasn’t static anymore. They all had their methods. Andy liked to occasionally spring things on her like telling her about the first time she’d ever experienced the written word because she seemed to really enjoy Nile commenting that yes, she knew Andy was older than _dirt_ but she was just trying to order lunch so could she save these sorts of revelations until after Nile had gotten through the menu. Nicky, for all that he was staggeringly gentle with his touch and mannerisms, was unapologetically blunt with his words. Though he didn’t say it often, there were nights where he would quietly comment that the particular convenience store they’d just left would be gone and the building likely unrecognizable by the time they were back in this area. Joe, though, framed her future through the lens of his own experiences. Like now, a reminder that one day her own birthplace would be turned over by the sands of time, but it would never take away any power she bestowed on it in her memory. Nile smiled a little and ducked her head to indicate for him to continue.

“So, March,” he picked up, “we couldn’t have been that far from the Maghreb, but I still didn’t recognize anything. We were traveling with some other merchants who were kind enough not to ask why I had a white man following me around. We had reached a city by sundown, but Nicky and I always camped a few miles away from whatever city we were near. Quiet night, wasn’t it?” Joe looked over at Nicky and Nicky nodded.

“Not many people were traveling through that time of year. We were fortunate to find the small group that we did,” he said. “We still agreed to trade watches. We never slept at the same time if we were camped alone.”

“Yes, Nicky took first watch,” Joe came back in, “I fought valiantly to take—”

“You were asleep before—”

“—his place. But alas, he won out.”

“—the fire had even gone to embers.”

They spoke over each other with a long-held familiarity that made Nile’s heart clench. She and her brother had spent years perfecting that art whenever their mother asked who broke the rosette serving platter, or who knocked over the half full watering can on the living room rug, or who tracked dirt all over the clean kitchen floors. Nicky gave a small snort that shook Nile from her reminiscing and she focused back to see Joe bring their linked hands up to brush a kiss across Nicky’s knuckles.

They smiled at each other for a moment more before Joe continued, “I’m sure you’ve noticed I’m a rather sound sleeper. But that’s never stopped the nightmares.” Nile couldn’t suppress a wince. She had her own nightmares still. She would have hoped by her 100th year they might fade but Andy had promised _you’re going to feel it_. Joe’s eyes went sympathetic, but he didn’t dwell on it, just kept on. “You know how hard it can be to wake someone from a nightmare?”

“I knew better than to reach for him,” Nicky said, surprising Nile as Joe was always the main narrator and Nicky seemed to prefer it that way. “The bruises always faded in seconds, but he’d feel guilty all the same if he lashed out. Usually he wakes if I call out to him enough times. This wasn’t a particularly bad one, I don’t think, because he woke up less than a minute after I noticed. When he woke, I didn’t want to ask which nightmare it was. I offered him what was left in our water skins and I sat with him.”

“You didn’t want to ask?” Nile asked, slightly incredulous. Nicky was always the first to ask her about her own nightmares, soothing and attentive. Joe shook his head.

“By then he knew them all,” he said. “They were all the same, anyway. I was a merchant, you know, I never intended to pick up a sword. I didn’t think of myself as much of a fighter, and I didn’t like to think of myself as a killer. You know how war changes things, though. It was still difficult then, to make peace with what I’d done and who I was in the wake of my decision to take up arms. He knew this, he knew what I dreamt of more often than not.”

“And anyway, it happened a lot,” Nicky said, blunt and gentle the way only he could be. “Nothing helped more than just sitting together. So that’s what we did.”

“We’d been walking for so long the day before,” Joe said, “I told Nicky to sleep. But he stayed up the whole night with me. I don’t think I even saw him yawn.” He leaned close to kiss that corner of Nicky’s mouth where his smiles started.

“I am very good at hiding it,” Nicky told Nile gravely, but his mouth was twisted up when Joe leaned back again. Joe laughed.

“We must have seen the planets,” Nicky continued, “if they were visible just before dawn, we must have. But we didn’t know.” Nile waited, expecting more, but they just met each other’s eyes again and were lost. She let them have their moment.

“So… you had a nightmare and Nicky stayed up with you when you couldn’t fall back to sleep. And it wasn’t even, like, the first time he did that?” she finally said. “That’s… so mundane.”

“What do you mean?” Joe asked, sounding affronted, though his eyes sparkled.

“I don’t know, the look you got, I expected it to be, like, the first time Nicky said he loved you or something,” Nile said, throwing out the first thing that came to mind. Nicky scoffed quietly.

“1226. We had known each other for over 100 years, you think it took me that long to tell Joe I loved him?” he asked. Nile shrugged again a little sheepishly.

“Well, no, but,” she started. She trailed off and sighed. “I don’t know, I guess I don’t know what I expected.” She couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed despite that, though. Joe and Nicky watched her for a few moments then glanced at each other. Joe smiled and Nicky let himself, for just a moment, rest his forehead against Joe’s shoulder.

“Not every memory you keep will be so major,” Joe told her. “Some of them will be mundane.”

“Andy likes to say it’s all about what time leaves behind,” Nicky said. Nile nodded, remembering when Andy had first said that to her. “What it leaves behind is not always bad, or good, or particularly exciting. Sometimes it leaves behind the most every-day moments. If you can learn to accept them as they are, not imbue them with any more meaning than what they had to begin with, you may avoid being swept up by its current.”

“Resting places,” Joe chimed back in, “they can be resting places. Where you don’t necessarily feel any worse or any better in the memory, maybe you don’t even feel anything at all. But it is a place along the plodding journey of time where you can pause and breathe and be for a little while. You don’t need to be stirred to any emotion, you can just sit with it like a warm fire and rest.” Nicky took his hand from Joe’s and buried it in his hair instead. Joe arched into his touch like a cat and Nile swore he’d be purring if he could.

“It has been a long time since we rested there,” Nicky said, warm and relaxed like they’d been sitting at that fire for much longer than it had taken to tell the story. He turned to Nile and graced her with one of his rare, full smiles. “Thank you.”

Nile smiled back. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Andy shift in the doorway. She knew Nicky and Joe must have clocked her long before now, but Nile hadn’t been paying attention. Andy placed her project on the counter, a running horse carved into what was once just a rough block. Nile turned to her.

“So,” she said. “Telescope. Equator.” Andy cracked the slightest of smiles.

“We’ll get you your damn telescope. The nicest we can find,” she said. “Start packing your bags, I don’t care that it’s not until December, I’m ready to leave.” Nile bounced up, excited again, and snatched her phone from the table.

“The next time this happens is in 2080,” Nicky called to her back as she went down the hall to her room.

“And I’ll bother you to see it then, too!” Nile promised.


End file.
